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by Tori Potenza, Staff Writer

As an avid physical media collector I love the work that boutique distribution labels like Severin put into their releases, both in terms of restoration, preservation and thoughtful additions to their releases like stories, essays, booklets, and special features. This is hardly surprising when the producer and curator of said collections is someone like Kier-La Janisse.

As someone who wears many different hats in the horror industry, Kier-La has long been someone I admire. She has written one of the most important books on horror, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (something akin to religious texts for some of us), she is a producer and works in acquisitions for Severin Films, she is the Founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and of course the director of Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror. And somehow she has even worn more hats than that! So it was an absolute privilege to get the chance to chat with Kier-La over zoom and to discuss All the Haunts be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror Vol. 2 the newest release from Severin Films. 

In the time that we chatted Kier-La gave me more insight into the work that goes on behind the scenes in terms of creating a collection of this magnitude, her own insights into the subgenre, some of her favorite aspects of the collection, and details on many of the special features that go along with it. She also told me about “The Haunted Season”, a film series just recently announced for Shudder. It was a challenge not trying to talk her ear off but she was incredibly generous with her time and provided plenty of thoughtful responses that I am sure fans of her work will love. If you have not had a look at the boxset it is available now at Severin along with many of the other gorgeous releases they have put out. (Find Tori’s review of the box set here.)

Tori Potenza (TP): Why did you want to make a follow up folk horror box set and what was the process like putting it together? 

Kier-La Janisse (KJ): Well, the idea to do another box set started pretty much right away. Mainly because there were some films we were trying to get for the first box set that we just couldn't get licensed in time. One of those films that's called the Rites of May, was still the last film we got licensed for the second box. That means we were trying for at least four years. And I was sort of also responding to some comments I had seen online about how they thought the documentary itself had sort of skipped over certain regions of the world or they were minimally mentioned. So Born of Fire and Scales were an attempt to represent some films in the Middle Eastern Regions.

I also really wanted to get the director and producer who made Scales on the disc but because they were in two different countries it took about a year to set something up, and ended up having to just do it at the last minute on zoom. But to me it was so important to have them on the disc because I know nothing about filmmaking in that region and so I assume a lot of our audience probably doesn't know much about it either. Especially for a woman director and woman producer making a film in Saudi Arabia. So certain things like that made it really important to do another box set. 

There were also a few films that are in the documentary but you only see a brief image of them and they were not named on screen. Films like The Ninth Heart and Beauty and the Beast. So it was a matter of trying to cover more ground. Broaden the geographical score a bit more, and tie up some of the films that carried over from the first boxset. Most of the films I already knew about except for Io Island which was a South Korean film I saw at the Fantasia Film Festival. And Jamil Dehlavi who made Born of Fire, I feel like I may have sort of discovered him after the documentary. I went to the Lausanne Underground Film Festival in Switzerland and that was when I saw a bunch f Delavi’s films because they were doing a retrospective on his work. He’s such an idiosyncratic director, like every one of his films you could put in the horror genre, but that’s not how he looks at it. 

We squeezed in as much as we could. It was a really interesting process, putting it together, because I feel like I was a lot more involved in the acquisitions for this box set compared to the previous one. I was actually trying to source the rights and source the film prints, and negatives mostly. I was way more hands on with that aspect of it. In every way it’s an expansion, you know? There are more films, more countries, and instead of a book of essays there is a book of short stories. 

TP: Oh yes, I was excited and also interested in the short stories. 

KJ: I had the idea to expand to a book format what we had done with the film To Fire You Come at Last which is a new production by Sean Hogan that we included as the first film in the box set. And I actually have some news I can share with you. I just got approval this morning to talk about it. So that film was a new production and I told Sean to make a film where you look into some sort of tradition or folk custom, but that is more focused on the minutia, like the process, rather than the big spectacle. So I gave him some examples and out of all the ones I gave, he chose corpse roads which was something he had been researching already. And then he wrote a script, and I had approval over the script, we made some edits but overall I just thought the script was incredible. He is such a good writer, and such a good writer of period dialogue.

So that process started the wheels turning in my head. So this is a very long answer to how the book came out but I expanded that same prompt to a dozen writers and said, “Can you write a folk horror story that is dealing with some kind of tradition, ritual, or custom?”. And they all interpreted it in different ways, so some have more spectacle than others. 

But just to go back to Sean’s film. This was before the film was even finished, I had seen maybe a couple of images from the set. So I set up a meeting with Sam Zimmerman as Shudder and I pitched the idea of me producing an annual ghost story for the Christmas series for Shudder. They’re basically just licensing it. I pitched Sean’s film as being the first of the series. But every year it will be a similar thing where it’s a new original production. We’ll do some festivals with it, but otherwise it’ll have a streaming premiere in December with Shudder. That has not been announced yet, but it is supposed to be later this week. It’s called “The Haunted Season”. Like with the box set it is expanded beyond the borders of a traditional ghost story for Christmas series in the sense that it takes place in winter or in a chilly environment but it is not limited to Christmas, we wanted it to be more open for international directors and writers. Although it is based on the British Ghost Story for Christmas series. 

TP: That is so exciting, especially as someone who is always looking for more winter season horror. I’m curious what first got you into the folk horror subgenre?

KJ: Well it was way before I knew that it was called, folk horror. I was always interested in films that fit the kind of Anglo-centric version of folk horror. You know, a stranger comes into some weird village and then the people of the village are trying to kill them. As a kid I was obsessed with Children of the Corn and as a teenager I was obsessed with The Wicker Man. At the beginning of The Wicker Man it would thank the people of Summerisle for giving access to their customs, so I totally thought Summerisle was real and I wanted to run away and go live on this island with all the pagans. 

Obviously it’s not real, but it was the first film location that I deliberately went and visited. It was a trek to get there because it was 9 hrs from Edinburgh and three trains. It was my first trip to the UK and I was by myself. I went through all kinds of weather and then I got there and the town really does have palm trees along the Harbor. It was a totally wacky experience because I walked into the pub, and it was literally like American Werewolf in London where everyone stops what they’re doing and turns to look at you. Then the bartender says to me ‘Are you a Wicker Man fan or a Hamish Macbeth fan? Turns out this other show had also been filmed there more recently. Apparently the only time anyone came to visit it was because they were a fan of one of those two things. So The Wicker Man was always a big one for me. 

I would say it was not until about 2009 maybe that I heard the term “folk horror”. A lot of these hauntology bands were coming out and it was a term I heard then. It didn't really start being used a lot like I didn't see it in the press like horror, press and stuff like horror websites and stuff, really, not until about 2012. When Kill List came out it really became a popular term. And the next couple of years there were a lot of articles online about Folk horror and what it was. It was about 2014 when it really exploded in Britain. When I made my folk horror documentary it was really at the end, when all the British people were sick of folk horror! So when I talked to them they were kind of like “snore” because they had all been writing about this stuff for about a decade. 

But when I interviewed more international people. They were just starting to come to grips with what this folk horror thing was and how it fit into the movies of their own culture. So that became a really interesting part of the movie, not just looking at folk horror through the traditional Anglo-centric version but like what kinds of scholars around the world considered to be folk horror. Because they had not grown up with the idea that folk horror is this thing that’s very related to British television in the 70s and stuff. So they were coming from it without that influence. Really why I wanted to make the documentary was, I pitched it to Severin as like a featurette for the Blood on Satan’s Claw blu-ray. It was supposed to be a short thing. 

TP: And it grew into a big thing. 

KJ: It was kind of weird because it was late, like two years late, so by the time I finished it I feel like American audiences knew the term and it had really infiltrated every aspect of horror fandom. By the time the movie came out you could not talk to a horror fan that didn’t know what folk horror was or hadn’t heard of it. I almost feel like if the film had been finished on time it wouldn’t have been received as well as it was. 

TP: It’s interesting because I feel like it’s had another kind of resurgence within the past few years. Even this year I feel like I’ve seen a lot of great folk horror, The Devil’s Bath and Nightsiren. 

KJ: I think it's easier to get money for them now because it is such a proven genre. That’s always the problem, you have filmmakers that have ideas and want to make movies but it takes forever for them to get anyone to believe in them and actually give them money to make it. So something has to be extremely popular. So some of those films may have been brewing for like ten years just because financiers are finally clued in. 

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